Clean and Elegant

Saturday, 16 November 2013

For a change from the usual sex and body parts, here is my
second consecutive blog about a Halifax literary event. This time I went to the
Spring Garden Road library where all the pigeons of Halifax congregate for
pizza crusts and rejected hotdogs. On Tuesday night, the library also hosted
author Andrew Kaufman who read from his new novel Born Weird.﻿

Born Weird has a yellow cover. Inside it tells the
story of the Weird family, named this way due to a mishap at Pier 21. The
family consists of five quirky siblings who find themselves on a quest to
reunite at their Grandmother Weird’s deathbed. There, if they arrive on time,
Grandmother Weird promises to undo the blursings she cast on her grandchildren.
A blursing, if you were wondering, isa blessing + a curse.Usually it is something that started as a blessing and
eventually turned into a curse. Just like when you fall in love with someone
because she rescues broken-winged ducks and abandoned pet turtles from the
park, and that ends up being the reason you break up.

Blursing.

Now you know.

Anyways, from what I’ve heard and read so far, Born Weird is
as playful and zany as the word blursing. Already I’ve been to Vancouver,
Winnipeg, a cardboard city somewhere in Ontario, Montréal and the Kingdom of
Upliffta, where Abba, one of the sisters is Queen.

At the Spring Garden Library, one of the cool people in the
audience asked Andrew why so much of his work centres on a road trip? Andrew
said quite simply that it provided a good narrative structure and he loves
structure. He loves quests. Quests go back to his favourite superheroes from
his favourite comic books. Actually, what he meant to say was that quests go
back to his fondness for classics. The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy. Etc. Andrew
added that road trips make the quintessential Canadian experience. Everyone
from Halifax know this. Everyone in the audience had been on a big road trip.
We had all been on road trips, and they'd changed us forever

The Road Trip was one of the big highlights of
his life. It changed him forever.

﻿The next intelligent question from the audience was whether
or not Born Weird evolved from something shorter like All My Friends Are
Superheroes and some of Andrew’s other work. Apparently, Born
Weird was the first book Andrew wrote all in one go, as a single,
longer piece. Andrew said that he is more comfortable writing around 17 000 to
20 000 words, which is more the length of a novella rather than a novel. In Born
Weird, he got around this by giving the Weird family lots of siblings.

And the third thing we learned was that in the nineties,
Andrew used to tell stories out loud. Spoken Word. Stephanie Domet, author of
Homing (a novel that involves pigeons and Spring Garden Road), and Fallsy
Downsies (about a folk musician on a road trip) asked Andrew if he missed that.
Andrew said no, and not only because Spoken Word is not quite as cool as it was
in the nineties. Besides Spoken Word, Andrew also gave up filmmaking. He feels
like making books leaves you with the most satisfying and enduring product. Ten
years later, a spoken word performance is long forgotten whereas in ten years,
a novel lives on, moldy in someone’s basement.

It seems as though Andrew Kaufman is somewhat
self-deprecating. Perhaps that’s his blursing. Or a clessing, a curse that ends
up being a blessing. I think it’s part of his charm.

If you live in Halifax, I recommend buying Born Weird at The Bookmark, on Spring Garden Road.
Andrew Kaufman signed my copy and I vow to keep it far away from my moldy
basement. Can’t wait to read the rest.

Sunday, 10 November 2013

This Saturday, I attended BookCamp Halifax 2013 at the Khyber
Centre for the Arts. BookCamp Halifax is a so-called “un-conference” where all
the strange and lovely book people in Halifax gather together to discuss book
issues such as publishing, marketing, and of course, writing. The event was
free and open to all kinds of book people of all calibres.

I started the morning with “Putting the 'Media' in Social
Media." I had a vague inclination to live tweet the entire un-conference.
Then former Chatelaine editor-in-chief Kim Pittaway reminded us that on
Twitter, she doesn’t so much notice your absence as your irritable presence.
Over the course of the day, my Twitter fans were privy to a few ingenious
comments about a free macaroon, the colourful and delightful Khyber bathrooms,
blue underwear and dinosaur porn, but that was about it. From the workshop, I gathered
that social media is certainly helpful, however, it can quickly become a huge
distraction and time suck. The most important thing about being a writer is how
much you write, not how many Twitter followers you have. At the social media
session, an audience member suggested brand new tweeters to follow the 2-2-2
rule: two tweets, two retweets, and two replies per day. This is supposed to
help you accumulate followers over time.

(To retweet or to reply to my innovative and brilliant
tweets, find me on @mypelvicfloor)

My next chosen session was “How to Make Headlines: Writing
for Magazines and Newspapers.” The panelists were Halifax Magazine editor
Trevor J. Adams, freelance writer Chris Benjamin, The Coast arts editor
Stephanie Johns and fashion magazine publisher Amanda Kincaid. I’ve
always been a fan of Chris Benjamin’s writing in The Coast. When talking
about freelancing, he said that when he first started, he was attached to a
bunch of big ideas that he wanted to write about and change the world. Over
time, he found he had to learn to hold these ideas a little less tightly and
focus on the story that needed to be told, and the people. I thought that this
was good advice. We also got advice from Trevor and Stephanie about writing
pitches. Trevor gave the simple model of 3 paragraphs. One about why he should
care, one about sources, and one about visual possibilities, something I’ve
never really thought about. Overall, I found the session quite useful. Maybe
someday I’ll write a pitch.

After lunch I went to Steven Laffoley’s session about
Creative Non-fiction. I thought the presenter looked extremely familiar before
realizing that he was the English teacher who stands in the Halifax Grammar
School parking lot every day greeting students and parents. I walk by him every
day on the way to the bus. My boyfriend Robbie, the Boatman, used to be his
student. He said he was a wonderful teacher. And he runs like a madman.
Apparently Stephen Laffoley also babysat Robbie when Robbie was seven. Wish I’d
been around for that.

Mr. Laffoley, as the Boatman calls him, has written six
books. His most recent one about boxer George Dixon. He sees creative
non-fiction as a cinematic exercise of framing facts in the way that tells the
best story, and turns the facts into timeless literature. He also said that
writing is like coughing up a lung, which I appreciated. I guess creative
non-fiction is selling pretty well these days, especially historical fiction in
Nova Scotia where people are interested in their history and there are so many
interesting stories from the past. Sounds like a good cure for pelvic
obsessions and self-absorption. I may consider this.

The next session was How to Write a Novel in 30 Days, by
Stephanie Domet, who hosts the CBC radio show Mainstreet and Atlantic Airways.
The horrendous idea of composing a novel in 30 days comes from National Novel
Writing Month, better known as NaNoWriMo, a worldwide network of writers who
take a pact to write a 50 000 word novel during the 30 days of November.
Stephanie hilariously and charmingly described how she haphazardly signed
herself up for the trauma so she could report about it on the CBC radio show Definitely
Not the Opera. The month was a disaster of total procrastination. By
Day 15, she had some vague ideas about a character who couldn’t leave the
house, and a ghost at the Spring Garden Road Library. Over dinner, her friend
joked that she might as well add pigeons to the mix. So she did. But by
November 27, she had less than 20 000 words down. That meant more than 10 000
words per day. Still, she did not use her time wisely, and on the last day,
ended up writing 20 000 words. Writing a novel in 30 days is about quantity,
and not quality. People who have succeeded in the past say that it helps to
have an outline of your characters wants, fears, the worst things that could
happen to them, and how you could orchestrate that happening to them. You can
follow this advice, or as Stephanie seems to have done, just write like hell.
In either case, in the end you get a draft that you can surgically repair into
something beautiful. Stephanie got a published book out of her 30-day novel Homing.
And now she knows that if the shit ever again hits the fan, she is capable of
writing 20 000 words in a day. But this is to be avoided.

I considered doing the 30-day novel month this year, but I
thought that it would turn into an overly ambitious New Year’s Resolution. I
suppose that there are still 20 days left… That’s 2500 words a day. We’ll
see. When I started I
Let Go, I vowed that it would be published on Amazon within three days.
Most of it was done in three weeks. Not terrible, however, most people can read
the entire thing in about 45 minutes. Oh well.

The final session of the day was where I learned about
Dinosaur Porn. In a fragmented skyped presentation, Sean Cranbury spoke
about how the internet and digital media has opened up all sorts of
possibilities in publication. Putting publication in the hands of the
creator has allowed for the unlikely rise of Dinosaur Erotica on Amazon.
After learning about self-publishing on Amazon, college students Alara
Branwen and Christie Sims have taken it upon themselves to grace the literary
world with tales of dinosaur boning and prehistoric lust.

I was immediately compelled to do further research on this.
In a
Huffington Post Interview between author Alaran Branwen and reporter Hilary
Hansen, Branwen postulates that dinosaur erotica appeals to our more base, carnal natures.
Some people also probably like the idea of a big, powerful, massive male
roughly having sex with a smaller female. It’s like the ultimate sexual
experience with an alpha male, which is something that we are all inherently
wired to enjoy.”

﻿

At Halifax BookCamp, I unfortunately didn’t get to
discuss this alpha dinosaur sex experience with any of the participants, but
this is my only complaint about the event. Otherwise, I had thoroughly
satisfying day, filled with tips and inspiration that stemmed far beyond sex
with pterodactyls.